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Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet Foods, Ingredients & Fine Wines
Eat In Guide’s Outstanding Outlet Award Winner from 2006 to 2010
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Lion’s Head on a wintry day, from Cape Town docks
In this week’s MENU:
Products Our market activities Luke Dale-Roberts, Awards & Pot Luck Taj Expressions of Stellenbosch Masterchef SA Chicken & peanut stew Wine courses, Events and RestaurantsProducts We hope that our order of Prego sauce will be ready tomorrow. The public holidays of the last week tend to throw spanners into the works of business. We have lots of the wonderful Mexicorn salsas and delicious French and Italian delicacies… patés, truffles, balsamic reductions etc. For those and any other products you need, you can access our product list and see pictures in our website. If you can’t find what you need, let us know and we will try to find it for you. Until our online shop is ready, drop us an email and we will help you. We are very happy to see that traffic on our website is increasing and more orders are coming from it.
We have a lot of fun putting MENU together each week and, of course, doing the things we write about, but making it possible for you to enjoy rare and wonderful gourmet foods is what drives our business. We stock a good range of ingredients and delicious ready-made gourmet foods. You can contact us by email or phone, or through our website. We can send your requirements to you anywhere in South Africa.
Our market activities We will be at the Old Biscuit Mill’s brilliant, exciting and atmospheric Neighbourgoods Market, as always, this Saturday and every Saturday between 09h00 and 14h00. Come and visit us at Long Beach Mall on Friday 11th May from 09h00 to 16h00.
What makes an award winning chef? In our opinion: Experience, subtlety, flair, a great palate, adventurousness, care for detail, consistency, food knowledge, stamina, great management skills, financial nous and the ability to pass all this on to their staff and still run a happy restaurant, and lastly, the ability to make money, not just reputation. Bravo and congratulations to Margot Janse at Le Quartier Français and Luke Dale Roberts of The Test Kitchen for making the top 100 Restaurants in the San Pellegrino & Acqua Panna Restaurants Awards this week. Yes, they have been higher on the list before but there is a great deal more competition out there in world restaurants in a recession. People have to work very hard indeed to make these lists.
Last night, we were invited to Luke’s other restaurant, The Pot Luck Club at the Biscuit Mill (next door and connected to the Test Kitchen) and it was a truly wonderful experience. We had fun, we ate like royalty and we will definitely go again. They have two seatings: 6 to 9 or 9 to 10.30 and we were booked into the early session, not always our choice as we do prefer to eat later. However, if you want to see your dishes cooked and get a blow by blow rundown of what each of them consists of, book a counter seat on an early session. Then when you know what you like, you can go to a late session and order it all. This dark and moody industrial style restaurant with an open kitchen and art on the walls gets busy early but is not as bustling, loud and fun as it is later and you can enjoy your food and discuss it at the same time. Some of the food is life changing in its ingenuity, simplicity and layers of complimentary flavours. It shows the many influences from the places that Luke has travelled to and worked in during his successful career. It is served Tapas style so you are meant to share but you could hog a whole dish to yourself if you absolutely adore it. And there are dishes that Lynne is now intent on trying to recreate at home, something she only does when she is intrigued and absolutely delighted by the food. The chef in charge of The Pot Luck Club kitchen is Nic Wilkinson, a local lad who has come from working at Scott’s in Mayfair in London (the older amongst you will know it as Ronnie Scott’s). He was assisted by the trainee chef Romy Jansen (amongst several others) from Silwood, who also explained to us the dishes she so ably served us. The staff is so impressive in the open kitchen, responding quickly to instructions and working smartly, quietly and quickly to produce lots and lots of dishes. And the service is slick. Do you want to see and read about what we had to eat? Follow this link.
The Pot Luck Club & Gallery is open for dinner from Tuesday to Saturday inclusive, and lunch on Saturday. For booking enquiries, call +27 21 447 0804 or email reservations@thepotluckclub.co.za
Mint Restaurant at the Taj, Expressions of Simonsberg, Bottelary and Stellenbosch with Guest Chef Christiaan Campbell of Delaire-Graff and wines from Greater Simonsberg, Stellenbosch Valley and Bottelary Hills
We joined the wine tasting at 6 and tasted some very impressive wines from the area like Bartinney’s classic cats pee and elderflower flavoured 2011 Sauvignon Blanc, their very vanilla 2010 Chardonnay; Dalla Cia’s Chardonnay and great red Giorgio; a selection of Warwick’s wines, the best of which was the Trilogy 2009, full of sweet liquorice, dark red fruits and elegant tannins with a very long finish. Martin Meinert’s Synchronicity 2007 Cape blend, almost balsamic in character, stood out well with its soft fresh fruit, red berries and lovely extraction of flavours. Jordan showed us their new The Real McCoy Riesling 2011 which has great balance and long flavours. Thelema also showed their drier Riesling, their Chardonnay and their Shiraz. Meerlust, their very French style Pinot Noir full of forest floor smells, mushrooms and marmite as well as the classic Rubicon red blend. Tokara’s Collection Chardonnay 2010 was smoky, limey and crisp and Delaire let us taste five wines, two of which were paired with dinner. Nice to taste the Beyerskloof Pinotage again, Lynne even agreed she might drink the Reserve 2009 often, not something she often does with Pinotage.
Our all time favourite of the evening was the outstanding Stork Shiraz from Hartenberg, a wine to rave about and wish we had the budget for cases of this wonderful, faultless wine. Such intense fruit, such quality and still so much time to go. Their Chardonnay, the Eleanor, was also the best one of the evening for us and it had some close competitors. It is so nice to see good Chardonnay taking front of stage again. Several of these wines were served with the rather rich dinner which followed. We had great company as we sat at the Delaire table and enjoyed the meal and wine together with their charming General Manager, Johan Laubser, his wife and their two marketing ladies. See photos and descriptions here. You can taste these dishes in Mint restaurant all through May, until the next tasting and dinner which will be Expressions of Robertson & Tulbagh.
Masterchef SA We have not mentioned South African Masterchef before, as we wanted to get into the series before commenting. Lynne is a great fan of the series and has watched the UK programme for years, both the Australian series’ that have been shown here and the awful USA programme with Gordon Ramsey, which was like an abridged version with serious attitude. To put it into perspective, they have stuck to the programme’s formula but is it art? Can they cook? We haven’t been shown much cooking or presentation skill yet; in fact, very little. Are they keeping the good cooks in the shadows? The new UK series started on Monday and the UK competitors (all amateurs) have to invent a dish from a mystery box, go straight into a pressured professional kitchen for a session, and then come back to the studio and cook their best two course menu. And this is just to get into the show. They are producing restaurant level food. We are not seeing this in the SA programme ... yet? Will it happen? We wait to see. One element we don’t like is letting the contestants vote for their peers. We think this is what the judges, who are the professionals, are there for. They tried this in the first series in Australia and the contestants managed to get rid of someone who was a threat and who might have gone on to win, rather than someone who was weak.
Chicken and Peanut Stew
The Sunday Times Food section this week featured recipes of interesting African food and there was a spicy Ghanaian chicken and peanut stew; Lynne decided to try. It was very interesting but, following the instructions to a T, she thinks it was cooked a little too long because the chicken all fell apart and the sauce thickened up a lot. We had it with samp and beans. However, it is good to be outside our comfort zone and try other food from our continent instead of Europe, Asia or America. If you want to try it, you will need to find a copy of last week’s Sunday Times.
There is a huge and rapidly growing variety of interesting things to occupy your leisure time here in the Western Cape. There are so many interesting things to do in our world of food and wine that we have made separate list for each month for which we have information. To help you choose an event to visit, click on our Events Calendar. All the events are listed in date order and we already have a large number of exciting events to entertain you right through the year. Click here to access the Calendar. You will need to be connected to the internet.
We have had a lot of enquiries from people who want to learn more about wine. Cathy Marston and The Cape Wine Academy both run courses, some very serious and others more geared to fun. You can see details here.
Some more restaurants have responded to our request for an update of their special offers and we have, therefore, updated our list of restaurant special offers. Click here to access it. These Specials have been sent to us by the restaurants or their PR agencies. We have not personally tried all of them and their listing here should not always be taken as a recommendation from ourselves. If they don’t update us, we can’t be responsible for any inaccuracies in the list. When we have tried it, we’ve put in our observations. We have cut out the flowery adjectives etc. that so many have sent, to give you the essentials. Click on the name to access the relevant website. All communication should be with the individual restaurants.
Winter is coming in with a bang, but we can still expect some wonderful clear and sunny days. Make the most of them and enjoy a picnic on a wine farm; several wine farms offer picnic facilities. We have put together a list of wine farms who can provide you with a picnic, We haven’t put in much detail, just where it is, phone number, email address and a link to the website. The latter is where you will find all the important information. Go and check it out.
3rd May 2012
Remember - if you can’t find something, we’ll do our best to get it for you, and, if you’re in Cape Town or elsewhere in the country, we can send it to you! Check our product list for details and prices.
PS If a word or name is in bold type and underlined, click on it for more information
Phones: +27 21 439 3169 / 083 229 1172 / 083 656 4169
Postal address: 60 Arthurs Rd, Sea Point 8005
Our Adamastor & Bacchus© tailor-made Wine, Food and Photo tours take small groups (up to 6) to specialist wine producers who make the best of South Africa’s wines. Have fun while you learn more about wine and how it is made! Tours can be conducted in English, German, Norwegian or Dutch flavoured Afrikaans.
Recommendations of products and outside events are not solicited or charged for, and are made at the authors’ pleasure. All photographs, recipes and text used in these newsletters are ©John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus. Our restaurant reviews are usually unsolicited. We prefer to pay for our meals and not be paid in any way by anyone. Whether we are invited or go independently, we don’t feel bad if we say we didn’t like it. Honesty is indeed our best policy. While every effort is made to avoid mistakes, we are human and they do creep in occasionally, for which we apologise. Our Avast! ® Anti-Virus software is updated at least daily and our system is scanned continually for viruses.
Recommendations of products and outside events are not solicited or charged for, and are made at the authors’ pleasure. All photographs, recipes and text used in these newsletters are ©John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus. Our restaurant reviews are usually unsolicited. We prefer to pay for our meals and not be paid in any way by anyone. Whether we are invited or go independently, we don’t feel bad if we say we didn’t like it. Honesty is indeed our best policy. While every effort is made to avoid mistakes, we are human and they do creep in occasionally, for which we apologise. Our Avast! ® Anti-Virus software is updated at least daily and our system is scanned continually for viruses.
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